I wrote here two years ago that it was, perhaps, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, but repeated the same claim last year. Yet all the newspapers and website are full with claiming that the anniversary is today. Never mind. I probably didn’t have the patience in 2009 and 2010 to wait until 2011. Here we are.
There’s quite a lot of attention to IWD here in the Netherlands today. The question why we still need it has luckily not been so prominent this year. This is a nice surprise, since I remember having seen asked this question on the 8th of March for the last… euh.. ten years or so (that is, as long as my memory serves me). I had an interview with a radio journalist early this morning and had prepared for that question, but she asked different ones. My answer would have been: we still need women’s day as long as women are not treated as equals to men, and both are treated with respect and dignity – but that also implies that, at least in some parts of the world but possibly in most parts of the world, we may need International Men’s Day too, since men who do not embrace dominant masculinities have a hard time in some areas too (child custody in some countries; birth leave in several EU countries, for example). If International Men’s Day were to contribute to thoughtful reflections on masculinities, it may well be a contributing to the liberation of some men, and definitely be welcomed by feminist/egalitarian women too. And it may also be a good thing for gay people, if the widespread account that homophobia is in (large) part driven by anxieties over masculinities is true.
I’m always curious to hear what people did on IWD (and recall from last year that some of you buy roses for your wife/girlfriend, which is definitely not the kind of political activities associated with IWD here in Western Europe). I ‘worked hard’ this year: on Sunday I was in a debate on the combination of care and paid work (and what policies are needed) in Amsterdam, and today I joined 6 other students and professors to stage the docu-play Seven, which recounts the true stories of seven amazing women leaders from across the world, who have been strong and inspirational against the odds (since most of them suffered a lot of abuse and violence). As a genuine actress-for-one-day I came home with a bunch of pink flowers, to the great delight of my five year old, who has pink as his favorite color. Happy International Women’s Day!
It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head. It had all begun six months earlier. “Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972. But what was Kuhn’s problem with Kripke?
The debate about social media and autocratic regimes can be (roughly) divided into two camps: idealists and realists. Idealists — my camp — believe social media will, on average, improve leverage for citizens seeking representative government; realists believe it won’t.
Because the events in North Africa and the Middle East are so important, both in themselves and in what they will lead us to expect about the future, I have been reading realist arguments especially closely in this period, and it was in this spirit that I came across Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution, by Andrei Soldatov, an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru.
Over the last few months, Sean Aday, Marc Lynch, John Sides and I have been talking a lot (and organizing a project with the US Institute of Peace) on the relationship between social media and civic unrest in non-democratic societies. Obviously, this has recently become a salient topic of debate. Clay Shirky, who has guestblogged with us before, and who was at a meeting that we organized in Stanford the week before last along with a number of other very smart people, has a post talking to some of these issues that I am just about to put up. I’m hoping that this can help get some interesting debate started.
Paul Krugman “is worried”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/autor-autor/ that lots of jobs will be replaced by machines in the near future. What will all those people do!? Brad DeLong “thinks”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/the-hollowing-out-of-the-us-income-distribution-under-the-pressure-of-technology.html there’ll still be plenty of jobs, but massive income inequality. Some of Brad’s commenters “think”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/the-hollowing-out-of-the-us-income-distribution-under-the-pressure-of-technology.html#comment-6a00e551f080038834014e5fb00b99970c that the reserve army of unemployed will take up prostitution on a large scale. Oh dear.
Allow me to suggest a third possibility. Instead of mass unemployment or horrendous inequality, technological improvement could reduce the time people spend working to meet their needs and give them more free time. Free time that they could use for other purposes (such as their all-round human development) . The “Jerry Cohen video”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/02/g-a-cohen-against-capitalism/ that I posted the other week centres on this very point. For more discussion see ch.11 of _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_ , which, I now see, furnished much of the script for that talk. Of course, if you take “free markets”, extensive private property and the domination of the political system by money (so that you can’t do much about the first two) as givens, then the third possibility will appear impossible or utopian. So you’d have to be an incompetent idiot to mention it, wouldn’t you?
We’re close to the three week mark here, so I thought I’d provide an update and ask for some help. Over the past week the authorities have restricted access to the Capitol, and there is no question that this has combined with the cold weather to diminish the size of the protests, though not by much (our 4 year old is sufficiently recalcitrant that not being able to take some warmth in the Capitol means that my wife and I tend to go separately, rather than together). Earlier this week live ammunition was found in the Capitol, providing a pretext for the use of metal detectors. It is a sign of the esteem in which the police are held that I have heard no-one here suggest that the police planted the ammunition – everyone thinks it was a right-winger and that the police will make a good-faith effort to expose who did it. Assembly Democrats with ground floor offices responded by holding office hours outside in the cold — desks were being hauled back and forth through mercifully large windows. The Republicans put out a hilarious estimate of $6.5 million for cleaning up the Capitol (getting the adhesive off the walls) which the press pretty quickly ridiculed and was then reduced to $450,000 — after which skilled members of the relevant trade union offered to volunteer their services to do the cleanup (I imagine we’ll be setting up a fund soon for reseeding the mudbaths which which were once the lawns surrounding the building).
One Republican senator, Dale Schultz, after extensive consultation in his district, has announced that he will vote against the collective bargaining provisions of the budget repair bill, and the polls are consistently looking worse for Walker and the Republicans — and recall efforts are gradually being coordinated reasonably effectively. It takes two more Republicans to flip, and there are rumours that one might be flipping soon (but there are lots of rumours, put about by each side to demoralize the other).
The Wisconsin 14 are still solid. It is clear that there is considerable variation in their commitment – some would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of their lives their if that’s what it would take, whereas others (eg some with young children) are, understandably, really feeling the strain. They have lost their parking spots, are being fined $100 per day for every day they are not in the Capitol while the Senate is in session, have had their paychecks withheld till they pick them up in person, and the Republicans have passed a statute requiring that they all be arrested “with or without force” (a statute that is almost certainly illegal). So here’s the request for help. I’m told this is the most effective page through which to contribute to their campaign coffers, which money they can use to support living expenses etc. [1] (In discussing whether to post this my wife said “you’re not going to help fund-raise for the Democratic Party are you?” so I checked to ensure this would go direct to specific campaign funds — good grief, even I’m breaking my rule of only contributing to the best Democrat in the State now).
One of the weirder aspects of Arthur Ripstein’s recent book on Kant’s Political Philosophy, “Force and Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674035062/junius-20, was the emphasis given to unwanted touching as a rights-violation. Now when a Canadian gives an exposition of a Prussian it isn’t altogether clear whose culturally-bounded norms might be infecting their normative intuitions. But I was immediately reminded of the discussion when I read “Simon Kuper’s column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db51a45e-4472-11e0-931d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Fp4ghsT3 in this weekend’s Financial Times. Kuper’s piece is based around Raymonde Carroll’s account of American and French cultural differences in her “Cultural Misunderstandings”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226094987/junius-20 . Well, “read the whole thing”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db51a45e-4472-11e0-931d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Fp4ghsT3 , as they say.
The Guardian reports that LSE Director Howard Davies has resigned in the wake of the school’s connections to the Gaddafi family and its acceptance of large donations from them.
bq. Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially… shows to the less developed the image of its own future…” Karl Marx was wrong.
Is it just me that thinks it is odd for DeLong to write this? It used to be a commonplace for people to say that Marx was wrong about this. But the people who said that he was wrong were typically _leftists_ , and their reason for saying it was the claim that Marx had failed to anticipate imperialism, the “development of underdevelopment” and all that stuff. So for them, Marx was wrong, because he thought that capitalism would develop economies everywhere, whereas they thought Lenin had shown that it would force some societies into a permanent state of underdevelopment. But DeLong is, by his own repeated admission, a “card carrying neoliberal”. And surely “card carrying neoliberals” believe in a future of globalized markets, urbanization, universal prosperity and (the cynics amongst us would add) strip malls and McDonalds. So am I missing something here? How do “card-carrying neoliberals” disagree with Marx on this point?
A very nice piece by long standing CT friend Christopher Phelps in the Chronicle (SM and I have known him for about 50 years between us), about the Wisconsin movement. An excerpt:
The crowds in red, as in the old Bangles song, are walking like an Egyptian. But they are also engaging in something we haven’t seen on this scale in a very long time: a dignified outpouring of a whole American community on behalf of labor. The events of late February are a striking example of what the English labor historian E.P. Thompson called “customs in common,” the web of shared traditions whose violation can propel people into the streets.
Custom in this case is the Wisconsin Idea, a notion that sometimes refers to the relationship between university and state but has a richer and more resonant history tracing to the state’s pioneering Progressive tradition. Its personification was the Republican Robert M. La Follette, who served as congressman, governor, and senator between the 1880s and 1920s. Through direct primaries, voter recall, civil-service standards, corporate taxation, regulation, and expert policy counsel from university scholars (rather than, say, corporate lobbyists)—a set of reforms together known as the Wisconsin Idea—La Follette sought to deal with what he called “the problems of vast financial power in private hands” on behalf of “the common man—the worker, the farmer.”
It has been a very long time since a Republican senator from Wisconsin has said, as did La Follette, “The only salvation for the Republican Party lies in purging itself wholly from the influence of financial interests.” But Madison is a capital city filled with public employees who take pride in the knowledge that Wisconsin was, in 1959, the first state to recognize public workers’ collective-bargaining rights. The Wisconsin Idea—a classroom staple of the very schoolteachers whose labor rights are now threatened—has been given new life by the multitudes chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.”
I was unaware of Phelps’ use of the Wisconsin Idea until I read this piece — on my end of State Street a different version, which concerns the value of the University to the State and its population, tends to prevail, but the version Phelps adopts is, in fact, another version with real currency, that I didn’t know. A small irony for me is that the person who first introduced me to the idea of the University version of the Wisconsin Idea, when he was a student in a political philosophy class — and went to great lengths to convince me I should start really learning a lot about education policy issues so that I could make some sort of practical contribution — is now one of the Democratic Assembly members leading the movement (and moment), and totally committed to the version of the idea that Phelps cites. Reading Phelps’ piece reminded me how much I owe to Cory Mason — I must thank him when he gets some time to relax. (By the way, he has a narrow majority, so if your name is not Koch, he’ll probably welcome donations, if you can figure out where to send them).
An aside: I came home from delivering the boy to preschool this morning and found the signs my middle one and her best friend made at my wife’s crisis committee meeting last night. “Soccer Rocks! So Do Unions!”, “We Want Unions!” etc. Can you imagine a city in the US in 2011 in which hundreds of 10-year-olds are making signs like those? It is surreal.
Just sent this to the Washington Post’s Ombudsman:
Today’s lead editorial on the Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft case blindly repeats a piece of government propaganda that has been decisively falsified in the court proceedings of that very case.
ABDULLAH AL-KIDD was arrested at Dulles International Airport in 2003 after purchasing a one-way, first-class ticket to Saudi Arabia.
In fact, testimony and subpoenaed airline records establish that Al-Kidd had a round-trip coach ticket. The government’s false statement — originally made to the court to justify arresting him — misled the court and it is this very pattern of government misrepresentations that played a significant role in the judicial turn against immunity which the Post (in my opinion wrongly) critiques. The Post’s error is no mere detail but serves as means of obfuscating — avoiding — the central facts that undermine the argument the Post wishes to make.
I guess if you use fake facts it’s easier to write editorials in favor of unlimited and un-accountable state power to detain US citizens (AP: “Over the next 16 days he would be strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes. On a long trip between jails, a federal marshal refused to unlock al-Kidd’s chains so he could use the bathroom.”).
No mere factual correction can fix this problem since that would fail to make clear that the factual change undercuts the entire logic of the editorial, but I have never yet seen a correction which makes such an admission, and don’t have much hope here.
The question for you, though, is this: how could the Post allow someone to write an editorial on such an important matter who isn’t even aware of one of the better-known facts of the case? And who doesn’t then check the facts. … the accurate facts were and are no secret: it almost takes work to avoid them.
I can’t say that this is particularly surprising. The editorial board of the _Washington Post_ is a disgrace. It’s the major reason I stopped my subscription some years ago, despite liking some people who write for the newspaper. When the senior editors of the newspaper repeatedly tell lies to their readers, some “obviously self-serving”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/08/24/synergies/, others, like this, in pursuit of a sinister and insane national security agenda, it tends to corrode one’s trust in the institution.
The shutdown of the US government has been deferred for two weeks, as a result of a Republican proposal which gives them $4 billion of facesaving but uncontroversial cuts (some already proposed by Obama, the rest unspent money set aside for possible earmarks, which they have already decided not to include in the Budget). This is a pretty big backdown, given the kind of rhetoric being thrown around after last year’s recapture of the House, suggesting positive eagerness for a shutdown. Among the factors contributing to the backdown, I think the vigorous resistance being mounted in Wisconsin, and the significant public sympathy it is attracting, would have to be the most important. Secondary, but also important is Obama’s bounceback in the polls. The bounce has been modest but surprising given the continued weakness of the economy. If the shutdown is blamed on the Reps[1], and the economy is recovering by 2012, their chances of victory don’t look so good.
That said, on past form, the odds have to favor an ultimate capitulation by the Dems. Given their relative strength, and the extreme demands of the Rep leadership (let alone the Tea Party), a pre-emptive capitulation sufficient to avert a shutdown looks unlikely. At the other end of the probability distribution, the chance that, in the context of an extended shutdown, the Reps might buckle as they did in 1995 looks more promising than before.
fn1. As Frank Rich points out, there is a compelling logic to blaming the Republicans for a shutdown, namely that the Republicans would clearly like to shut down the (non-military bits of the) Federal government, whereas the Dems would not.
This is currently mainly being covered as an excuse to do larf-o-larf items about “weren’t people funny about women drivers in the 1970s! But actually women are safer drivers! Imagine!”. In actual fact the car insurance thing is not that big of a deal since the no-claims bonus swamps any gender effect within a couple of years; all it really means is that nobody will insure teenagers at all, which I count as not necessarily an unmitigated cost. The real issue is pensions.
Women live longer than men. That’s one of the few actuarially reliable things you can say about life expectancy[1]. And so it requires more resources to provide a given level of life expectancy for women than it does for men. (NB: it is easy to get confused about this – remember that “risk” in context always means “financial risk to the insurer” rather than “health outcome or mortality risk to the insured”, and that living for a long time is bad news for the person who’s agreed to pay you an annuity).
Because it costs more to give women a retirement income, you can basically choose two options from the following three:
1) Equal retirement incomes for women and men
2) Equal commitment of society’s resources to providing retirement savings for women and men
3) A functioning pension annuity industry
There are a load of interesting questions about the nature of equality which might be considered relevant to the choice between 1) and 2) (although they might be considered a lot more practically relevant in a society where there was a greater degree of equality in lifetime earnings). I’m just interested to see that for the first time, a major society has decided that 3) is potentially the one to give up on. Edit: Just realised I probably ought to give my own favoured solution – I think it’s fairly obvious that 2) is the one to give up on and we just have to accept that the biological facts of the matter are that society needs to arrange things so that a given woman has a larger pool of retirement savings allocated to each other than an otherwise qualitatively identical man[2]. It’s rather like the number of social and economic consequences that we accept as flowing from the biological fact that women give birth and men don’t. Historically, capitalist economies have implicitly given up on 1), by allowing retirement incomes to be determined by savings out of lifetime labour income.
[1] by the way, don’t hold out too much hope for genetic testing as a silver bullet solution that will give us all individualised life expectancies and annuity rates. And even if it does, those rates will still be better for men as a group than women as a group, so the discrimination problem will still be there).
[2] the concept of “a woman and man who are identical in all properties except gender” perhaps not being terribly firmly anchored in reality, but as an actuarial construct I can probably save it.